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Offensive Hedge Gets The Snip

FelixAntonius

Justified & Ancient
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Aug 8, 2001
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Offensive hedge gets the snip

Jordan Day

Ian Ashmeade's hedge in Haddenham before he was forced to re-shape itA keen gardener was stunned when police threatened him with a fine for a public order offence - because his garden hedge was shaped like a phallus.
Haddenham resident Ian Ashmeade first pruned a bush in his garden into a phallic shape in 2002 after noticing the plant was growing into a similar shape naturally.

For years, passers-by and locals have chuckled at the shrub in his garden, in Linden Way, but police received a call from someone who was offended by it.

Cambridgeshire Constabulary warned Mr Ashmeade to reshape the bush or face an £80 fine.

Ian Ashmeade, has since trimmed it back into the shape of a pea shooter after he was crowned ‘world pea-shooting champion’ at the annual pea shooting championships in Witcham this summer.
Police said if he had not had trimmed the bush back, he would have been fined for a public order offence.

Source:
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Of ... e-snip.htm
 
has since trimmed it back into the shape of a pea shooter

Symbolic of many a proud man's decline. :(
 
Wouldn't happen in Japan - they have an annual festival in honour of the phallus.

Is it just me or is the world getting more prude by the minute?
 
He could have just claimed that it was a Policeman's Helmet....
 
Next it will be the Cerne Abbas giant that will be given the pea shooter treatment :(
 
Not a new story, but it doesn't seem to have been covered in FTMB before:

Nicolas Poussin painting of Priapus was censored to spare blushes
An art restorer has discovered a new layer to a painting by the French artist Nicolas Poussin depicting Priapus, the Greek god of fertility: the deity's erect penis.
1:03AM BST 02 Sep 2009

"They hid the phallus of Priapus. It's what we call adjustment for modesty," Regina Pinto Moreira told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper.
She suspects the cover-up was made in conservative Catholic Spain in the 18th century.

Moreira, who worked as a master art restorer at the Louvre in Paris for 30 years, spent eight months alongside two French experts restoring Poussin's large 1634-1638 painting "Hymenaios Disguised as a Woman During an Offering to Priapus."

The 3.7m (12ft) by 1.7m (5.5ft) painting shows Hymenaios, the Greek god of marriage ceremonies, dressed as a woman and dancing with Priapus.
The painting however once belonged to the Spanish royal family, and Moreira said she thinks this was when the post-production modesty came in.

Removing layers of dirt, dust and paint specks that accumulated over more than three centuries cost 150,000 euros (213,000 dollars).
The artwork will be put on display at Sao Paulo's Grand Museum of Art on September 8.

Following the Napoleonic wars, the painting moved from Spain to the hands of English aristocrats, then was sold to French art dealer Georges Wildenstein. He sold it in 1953 to influential Brazilian journalist and MASP founder Francisco Assis Chateaubriand.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/ ... ushes.html
 
It does seem the world is more prudish today.

In the 1970s magazines had bare breasted models on the covers as a matter of course. Now there's a crisis triggered by the 'All-Destroying Tit of Janet Jackson'! Sheesh!

Miley Cyrus(remember, she won't have that bod forever, let us enjoy it in its season?) can dominate the news by wearing a skimpy bathing suit.

It's skin-get used to it.
 
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